With one UFC event already in the books this week and another one still to come on Saturday, seems only fitting to squeeze in a Twitter Mailbag wherein we discuss Donald Cerrone’s spectacular win over Jim Miller, and Conor McGregor’s high hopes against Diego Brandao.

Will we also find some time to ponder the mystery of Demetrious Johnson vs. Chris Cariaso, and Floyd Mayweather’s use of masculine pronouns with regard to UFC women’s bantamweight champ Ronda Rousey? You bet your Dude Wipes we will.

About as excited as I’d be for Cerrone vs. Nate Diaz II, or Cerrone vs. Anthony Pettis II, or Cerrone vs. Benson Henderson III. Hell, at this point I could get myself worked up for Cerrone vs. that old so-and-so TBA. That’s how much fun it is when “Cowboy” shows up to work.

But you have a point. Combine Cerrone’s flippant willingness to fight Khabib Nurmagomedov with the oh-wait-I-suddenly-remembered-I-have-a-dentist-appointment-that-day attitude that Nurmy inspires in much of the rest of the division, and it just makes sense to lock those two in a cage together. Whoever wins, that person’s probably your next title contender. And if/when that fight has a date and a venue, remember to use your blinker as you go careening off the road and into the nearest tavern with a TV in time to watch it.

He’s up there, for sure. It helps that there is already some natural, uh, let’s say synergy between the man and the brand. It’d be like if a brand of beard combs sponsored Johny Hendricks, or GQ Magazine sponsored Anthony Pettis. It just makes sense.

@benfowlkesMMA Will Cerrone start making his way to PPV cards instead of staying on the televised cards? Would it hurt his 6 fights a year?

Since moving to the UFC following the WEC roster merge at the end of 2010, Cerrone has fought in seven events that were free on cable or network TV. In that same time span, the number of UFC pay-per-views he’s fought on is seven.

So yeah, I don’t know if we need to be too concerned that his talents are being wasted on free TV, and it seems pretty clear that he’s not overly worried about it. What he’s worried about is fighting as much as humanly possible. With 14 fights in less than four years, I’d say he’s accomplishing that mission.

@benfowlkesMMA we already know the UFC is hedging its bets behind Conor; what happens if he doesn't perform? Or worse yet, is injured again?

I wouldn’t say the UFC is hedging its bets with Conor McGregor — to hedge is to adopt a position that will reduce or offset your losses on a previous position, the way you might bet on a favored horse to show after betting on a longshot to win. What the UFC is doing with McGregor is more like shoving all its U.K. eggs in his Irish basket, and using a bulldozer to do it.

You look at the pre-fight build-up for Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 46 main event, and it looks a lot like the Conor McGregor Show. Diego Brandao? He’s just some guy. The UFC needs him to show up in Dublin, but that’s about it.

Clearly, the UFC thinks it can make some serious coin with a charismatic, exciting fighter like McGregor, and it’s probably right. At least, it is if he turns out to be as good as he keeps telling us he is.

That’s the thing, though: We don’t really know yet how good he is. His ground game is still a question mark, which is one of the reasons why the original match-up against Cole Miller was so enticing. Brandao’s not a bad substitute, but his best chance here is if the MMA gods decide to smite McGregor (and with him the UFC’s future plans) for his hubris. That could happen. More likely, McGregor will roll over Brandao, hopefully without injuring himself, and we’ll get to see him fight somebody near the top of this very tough division next.

One thing I feel very confident in, you’re going to need more than a sharp suit and quick tongue to last long as a UFC featherweight these days.

One could argue, as I’m sure the UFC will, that Johnson has so thoroughly cleaned out the division that, especially with John Dodson out with a knee injury, there’s no one else.

Thing is, that’s clearly not true. There are other options. There just may not be anyone else who a) happens to be from northern California, where UFC 177 takes place, and b) is willing to roll the dice against the best fighter in the division on such short notice.

My problem with this sort of matchmaking is that instead of starting with a champion and a challenger and then figuring out where and when they should fight, it starts with a date and a place and treats the actual people involved as secondary concerns. The UFC wanted to be able to say that UFC 177 is a card with two title fights. So it looked around and asked, “Who’s our most expendable champion, a champ who doesn’t draw on his own, and who therefore might as well be thrown onto this card for the sake of appearances?” And there, like a savior in waiting, was “Mighty Mouse.”

Give him credit. He’s ready to go. He’ll fight whoever. But instead of waiting to see how some of the division’s legitimately interesting bouts play out – Brad Pickett has a win over Johnson at bantamweight, and he fights Ian McCall this weekend; Jussier Formiga beat Cariaso in early 2013, and he fights former Bellator champ Zach Makovsky two weeks before UFC 177 – the UFC got impatient. It needed to fill a hole, so screw it, just have Johnson fight some guy.

The need for a fight overrules the need for any particular fight. And why not? It’s not like champions ever get hurt in one-sided squash matches, right Ronda Rousey and Jon Jones?

@benfowlkesMMA do fighters need to have a manager? Monday we heard on junkie radio that a fighter didn't get any of his sponsorship money

That’s a more common story than you’d probably believe. I can’t tell you how many fighters I’ve talked to who either didn’t get their sponsor money, didn’t get all of it, or simply weren’t sure if or when they’d be paid.

Did they still owe management fees, they wondered? Was there even any sponsor money left over? In the confusion, maybe they didn’t feel like mentioning it, and so maybe nothing ever happened.

Again, it’s surprisingly common. Some of that is the fighter’s own fault, but some is also the manager taking advantage of the very reason fighters hire managers in the first place.

Contrary to what Mike Dolce says, the manager’s job isn’t just to answer the phone and say yes when UFC matchmaker Joe Silva calls. A lot of it is dealing with all the crap that a fighter doesn’t want to have to worry about when there’s a fight to prepare for. Fighters should be training, resting and eating. They should be getting their minds right before a fight, not calling up local car dealerships looking for sponsors or trying to figure out where and when to get their medicals done. As the fight approaches, there are dozens of annoying little administrative tasks that need to be taken care of, and fighters? Not to stereotype, but they are generally not the kind of people who excel at annoying little administrative tasks.

Does that mean they need a manager? I don’t know. They definitely need somebody. They need advice, both contractual and otherwise. They need an administrative assistant of sorts. They also, as fighter-turned-manager Charles McCarthy once pointed out, need someone to keep it real with them. He should know. He managed himself during his UFC days. What he found out the hard way was that, as smart and level-headed as you might think you are, “when it’s yourself and your own career, you think unrealistically sometimes.”

@benfowlkesMMA who will @_HOLLYHOLM get first?How many wins will she need for a title shot?IMO she is critical for the division.

According to Holly Holm and her manager, Lenny Fresquez, they want at least a couple fights before thinking about a title shot. After Leslie Smith’s strong showing in a first-round TKO of Jessamyn Duke on Wednesday night, I heard the idea floated of letting Smith welcome Holm to the UFC. That sounds like a lot of fun, though really, I think you could match Holm up against just about any woman in the 135-pound top 15 and you’d get an interesting test of her skills.

If you’re the UFC, what Holm gives you is time. Time to develop a challenger who people really want to see in a fight against women’s bantamweight champ Ronda Rousey, and time to develop the division as a whole while that fight comes to fruition (or doesn’t, for all we know).

As for Holm, when I asked her about the months-long negotiation process to bring her to the UFC, she had an interesting comment that pertains to the above question about whether fighters need managers.

“Lenny’s kept me busy fighting for the last 10 years, so I let him take care of it,” she said. “It’s a good thing I don’t represent myself, because I’m terrible at making those calls. Just give me the date and the opponent, and I’ll get to work.”

I’d hate to question the degree to which Floyd Mayweather Jr. could be totally disconnected with reality, because I am willing to believe that, with regards to a lot of stuff, he has no idea what is going on outside his own bubble. But this one rang false to me. Really, you’ve never even heard of Ronda Rousey? You’re telling me that while the combat sports world has been having this infuriatingly pointless conversation about whether she could beat you up, the echo of it never found its way to your ears until now? I find that difficult to believe.

I also think there’s something strange about the phrasing. “I don’t know who he is.” The more common, natural way to phrase that in standard American English would be, “I don’t who that is.” And in fact, that is exactly how Mayweather puts it after his interviewers explain who she is. The fact that he inserted the “he” in the initial response suggests to me that Mayweather knew exactly what he was doing. But what else could he really say? If you have Mayweather’s personal track record for violence against women, you’d probably rather turn that conversation into one about name recognition – and fast.

I quote “The Sisters Brothers,” Patrick DeWitt’s excellent novel about two 19th-century hitmen: “Every man that has ever held a position has thought about quitting.”

The weird thing about doing something that you love for a living and would probably do, in some capacity, whether you were getting paid or not, is that it takes a passion and turns it into a job. There are the days where you don’t feel like doing it, or don’t feel like doing specific aspects of it, or specific assignments. You also care more about it than you would with just some job, which means you develop a potentially unhealthy tendency to connect your self-worth to your job performance.

So yeah, of course you think about what it might be like to let that go and do something else. But then, this morning I woke up even before the toddler-sized alarm clock in the next room told me to, all because I was excited to finish the column I started the night before about how awesome Donald Cerrone is. That’s something you don’t get with most jobs.

As for my friend Mike Chiappetta, he’s a good writer, good journalist, good man, and it’d be a shame to lose him from the ranks of the MMA media for good. Somehow, I doubt we will.

@benfowlkesMMA Chances DW does sign Carano this week? Are she and Holm the back up when Ronda leaves for a bit?

If the UFC does manage to come to terms with Gina Carano, I suspect she’ll go straight into a title fight against Rousey, lose badly, make a bunch of money, then disappear again.

That’s one of the reasons I’m not terribly interested in it. That, and the fact that I think it’ll be about as competitive as a squirrel wandering out in front of a Chevy. It’s been almost five years since Carano last fought. The game done changed since then, especially on the women’s side, and it’s not like Carano’s been putting in the work inside serious fight gyms in order to change with it. This is a cash grab, both for Carano and for the UFC. It would also probably a pretty sweet deal for Rousey, too. The only ones who get short-changed are the fans who buy it thinking it’ll be anything other than a dominant champion beating up an actress who used to fight, once upon a time.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.

ALBANY, N.Y. – MMAjunkie is on scene and reporting live from today’s UFC Fight Night 102 event at Times Union Center in Albany, N.Y., which kicks off at 5:45 p.m. ET (2:45 p.m. PT). You can discuss the event here.

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